Multiculturalism: Expanded Paperback Edition

Summary

A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding multiculturalism. Charles Taylor's initial inquiry, which considers whether the institutions of liberal democratic government make room--or should make room--for recognizing the worth of distinctive cultural traditions, remains the centerpiece of this discussion. It is now joined by Jürgen Habermas's extensive essay on the issues of recognition and the democratic constitutional state and by K. Anthony Appiah's commentary on the tensions between personal and collective identities, such as those shaped by religion, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality, and on the dangerous tendency of multicultural politics to gloss over such tensions. These contributions are joined by those of other well-known thinkers, who further relate the demand for recognition to issues of multicultural education, feminism, and cultural separatism.

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Preface (1994)

SINCE its publication in 1992, Multiculturalism and The Politics of Recognitionhas appeared in Italian, French, and German editions. The German edition includes an extended commentary by the political philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who adds an important voice to a now-multinational discussion about the relationship between constitutional democracy and a politics that recognizes diverse cultural identities. We invited K. Anthony Appiah, Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy at Harvard, to offer his reflections on the politics of recognition. Appiah has written a rich essay on the problematic relationship between recognition of collective identities, the ideal of individual authenticity, and the survival of cultures. We are pleased to be able to include both essays in this expanded edition.

Drawing on a Kantian perspective, Habermas argues that equal protection under the law is not enough to constitute a constitutional democracy. We must not only be equal under the law, we must also be able to understand ourselves as the authors of the laws that bind us. Once we take this internal connection between democracy and the constitutional state seriously, Habermas writes, it becomes clear that the system of rights is blind neither to unequal social conditions nor to cultural differences. What count as equal rights for women or for ethnic and cultural minorities cannot even be understood adequately until members of these groups articulate and justify in public discussion what is relevant to equal or unequal treatment in typical cases. Democratic discussions also enable citizens to clarify which traditions they want to perpetuate and which they want to discontinue, how they want to deal with their history, with one another, with nature, and so on. Constitutional democracy can thrive on the conflict generated by these discussions and live well with their democratic resolutions, Habermas suggests, as long as citizens are united by mutual respect for others' rights.

Habermas distinguishes between culture, broadly understood, which need not be shared by all citizens, and a common political culture marked by mutual respect for rights. Constitutional democracy dedicates itself to this distinction by granting members of minority cultures equal rights of coexistence with majority cultures. Are these group rights or individual rights? Habermas maintains that they are individual rights of free association and nondiscrimination, which therefore do not guarantee survival for any culture. The political project of preserving cultures as if they were endangered species deprives cultures of their vitality and individuals of their freedom to revise and even to reject their inherited cultural identities. Constitutional democracies respect a broad range of cultural identities, but they guarantee survival to none.

Appiah's essay provides further reason to worry about the demand for cultural survival understood as a political guarantee that any culture continue to exist through indefinite future generations. Appiah agrees with Taylor that there are legitimate collective goals whose pursuit will require giving up pure proceduralism, but indefinite cultural survival is not among those goals. In explaining why, Appiah gives voice to the ideal of individual autonomy, exploring its uneasy relationship with collective identity.

Appiah asks us to worry about the fact that collective identities—the identification of people as members of a particular gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, or sexuality—"come with notions of how a proper person of that kind behaves: it is not that there is one way that gays or blacks should behave, but that there are gay and black modes of behavior. Personal dimensions of identity—being witty, wise, and caring—do not typically work in the same way as the collective dimensions. The collective dimensions, Appiah writes, provide what we might call scripts: narratives that people can use in shaping their life plans and in telling their life stories. In our society (though not, perhaps, in the England of Addison and Steele) being witty does not in this way suggest the life-script of ‘the wit.’"

The life-scripts associated with women, homosexuals, blacks, Catholics, Jews, and various other collective identities have often been negative, creating obstacles to, rather than opportunities for, living a socially dignified life and being treated as equals by other members of their society. The demand for political recognition might be viewed as a way of revising the inherited social meaning of their identities, of constructing positive life scripts where there once were primarily negative ones. It may even be historically, strategically necessary, Appiah speculates, for the story to go this way. But, he immediately adds, anyone who takes autonomy seriously should not be satisfied were the story to end this way, for would we not have then replaced one kind of tyranny with another? Is the strategic virtue of a politics of recognition not also a vice from the perspective of individual autonomy? Appiah rejects group recognition as an ideal because it ties individuals too tightly to scripts over which they have too little authorial control. The politics of recognition, Appiah worries, requires that one's skin color, one's sexual body, should be acknowledged politically in ways that make it hard for those who want to treat their skin and their sexual body as personal dimensions of the self. And personal means not secret, but not too tightly scripted.

Can there be a politics of recognition that respects a multitude of multicultural identities and does not script too tightly any one life? Both Appiah and Habermas offer complex answers to this question, pointing to the possibility that some form of constitutional democracy may offer such a politics, based not on class, race, ethnicity, gender, or nationality, but rather on a democratic citizenship of equal liberties, opportunities, and responsibilities for individuals.

Amy Gutmann

March 25, 1994

Preface and Acknowledgments

THIS VOLUME was first conceived to mark the inauguration of the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Founded in 1990, the University Center supports teaching, research, and public discussions of fundamental questions concerning moral values that span traditional academic disciplines. Central among those questions is what kind of communities can justly be created and sustained out of our human diversity. Unprecedented powers of creation and destruction are at the disposal of increasingly interdependent societies, with remarkably diverse cultures, governments, and religions. Colleges and universities like Princeton have themselves become increasingly pluralistic communities. Accompanying this pluralism is a widespread skepticism about the defensibility of any moral principles or perspectives. Many moral problems are upon us, and many people question our ability to deal with them in a reasonable way.

The ethical issues of our time pose a challenge to any university committed to an educational mission that encompasses more than the development and dissemination of empirical knowledge and technical skills. Can people who differ in their moral perspectives nonetheless reason together in ways that are productive of greater ethical understanding? The University Center faces up to this challenge by supporting a university education that is centrally concerned with examining ethical values, the various standards according to which individuals and groups make significant choices and evaluate their own as well as other ways of life. Through the teaching, research, and public discussions that it sponsors, the University Center encourages the systematic study of ethical values and the mutual influences of education, philosophy, religion, politics, the professions, the arts, literature, science and technology, and ethical life. In no small part, the promise of ethical understanding lies in its educational practice. If universities are not dedicated to pushing our individual and collective reasoning about human values to its limits, then who will be?

Many dedicated people contributed to creating the University Center, more than I can mention here. But a few people deserve special thanks. When Harold T. Shapiro delivered his Inaugural Address as eighteenth President of Princeton University in 1988, he focused on the importance of the university's role in encouraging ethical inquiry, not to proclaim a set of doctrines for society, but rather to ensure that students and faculty keep the important problems of our humanity before us—and always keep up the search for alternatives. President Shapiro carried through on his words in supporting the University Center.

It has been my great pleasure to work with a group of superb scholars and teachers from many different disciplines who have directly shaped the University Center and indirectly shaped this volume. Central among them are John Cooper, George Kateb, Alexander Nehamas, Albert Raboteau, Alan Ryan, Jeffrey Stout, and Robert Wuthnow, all members of the University Center's executive committee who worked collaboratively for countless hours to create the University Center. Helen Nissenbaum, the Associate Director, joined the University Center just in time to oversee planning for the Inaugural Lecture. She has also contributed in invaluable ways in shaping this volume from start to finish. Valerie Kanka, Assistant in the University Center, carried through on countless details with great verve and commitment.

On behalf of everyone who has contributed to creating the University Center and everyone who will benefit from its creation, I thank Laurance S. Rockefeller, Princeton Class of 1932, whose generosity and vision have made the University Center possible. We dedicate this inaugural volume to him.

Amy Gutmann

Director, University Center for Human Values

PART ONE

Introduction

AMY GUTMANN

PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS, including government agencies, schools, and liberal arts colleges and universities, have come under severe criticism these days for failing to recognize or respect the particular cultural identities of citizens. In the United States, the controversy most often focuses upon the needs of African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, and women. Other groups could easily be added to this list, and the list would change as we moved around the world. Yet it is hard to find a democratic or democratizing society these days that is not the site of some significant controversy over whether and how its public institutions should better recognize the identities of cultural and disadvantaged minorities. What does it mean for citizens with different cultural identities, often based on ethnicity, race, gender, or religion, to recognize ourselves as equals in the way we are treated in politics? In the way our children are educated in public schools? In the curricula and social policy of liberal arts colleges and universities?

This volume focuses on the challenge of multiculturalism and the politics of recognition as it faces democratic societies today, particularly the United States and Canada, although the basic moral issues are similar in many other democracies. The challenge is endemic to liberal democracies because they are committed in principle to equal representation of all. Is a democracy letting citizens down, excluding or discriminating against us in some morally troubling way, when major institutions fail to take account of our particular identities? Can citizens with diverse identities be represented as equals if public institutions do not recognize our particular identities, but only our more universally shared interests in civil and political liberties, income, health care, and education? Apart from ceding each of us the same rights as all other citizens, what does respecting people as equals entail? In what sense should our identities as men or women, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, or Native Americans, Christians, Jews, or Muslims, English or French Canadians publicly matter?

One reasonable reaction to questions about how to recognize the distinct cultural identities of members of a pluralistic society is that the very aim of representing or respecting differences in public institutions is misguided. An important strand of contemporary liberalism lends support to this reaction. It suggests that our lack of identification with institutions that serve public purposes, the impersonality of public institutions, is the price that citizens should be willing to pay for living in a society that treats us all as equals, regardless of our particular ethnic, religious, racial, or sexual identities. It is the neutrality of the public sphere, which includes not only government agencies but also institutions like Princeton and other liberal universities, that protects our freedom and equality as citizens. On this view, our freedom and equality as citizens refer only to our common characteristics—our universal needs, regardless of our particular cultural identities, for primary goods such as income, health care, education, religious freedom, freedom of conscience, speech, press, and association, due process, the right to vote, and the right to hold public office. These are interests shared by almost all people regardless of our particular race, religion, ethnicity, or gender. And therefore public institutions need not—indeed should not—strive to recognize our particular cultural identities in treating us as free and equal citizens.

Can we then conclude that all of the demands for recognition by particular groups, often made in the name of nationalism or multiculturalism, are illiberal demands? This conclusion is surely too hasty. We need to ask more about the requirements of treating people as free and equal citizens. Do most people need a secure cultural context to give meaning and guidance to their choices in life? If so, then a secure cultural context also ranks among the primary goods, basic to most people's prospects for living what they can identify as a good life. And liberal democratic states are obligated to help disadvantaged groups preserve their culture against intrusions by majoritarian or mass cultures. Recognizing and treating members of some groups as equals now seems to require public institutions to acknowledge rather than ignore cultural particularities, at least for those people whose self- understanding depends on the vitality of their culture. This requirement of political recognition of cultural particularity— extended to all individuals—is compatible with a form of universalism that counts the culture and cultural context valued by individuals as among their basic interests.

We encounter problems, however, once we look into the content of the various valued cultures. Should a liberal democratic society respect those cultures whose attitudes of ethnic or racial superiority, for example, are antagonistic to other cultures? If so, how can respect for a culture of ethnic or racial superiority be reconciled with the commitment to treating all people as equals? If a liberal democracy need not or should not respect such supremacist cultures, even if those cultures are highly valued by many among the disadvantaged, what precisely are the moral limits on the legitimate demand for political recognition of particular cultures?

Questions concerning whether and how cultural groups should be recognized in politics are among the most salient and vexing on the political agenda of many democratic and democratizing societies today. Charles Taylor offers an original perspective on these problems in The Politics of Recognition, based upon his Inaugural Lecture for the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

Taylor steps back from the political controversies that rage over nationalism, feminism, and multiculturalism to offer a historically informed, philosophical perspective on what is at stake in the demand made by many people for recognition of their particular identities by public institutions. In the ancien régime, when a minority could count on being honored (as Ladies and Lords) and the majority could not realistically aspire to public recognition, the demand for recognition was unnecessary for the few and futile for the many. Only with the collapse of stable social hierarchies does the demand for public recognition become commonplace, along with the idea of the dignity of all individuals. Everyone is an equal—a Mr., Miss, Mrs., or Ms.—and we all expect to be recognized as such. So far, so good.

But the claims of equal citizens in the public sphere are more problematic and conflict-ridden than our appreciation of the collapse of aristocratic honor would lead us to expect. Taylor highlights the problems in the ingenious attempt by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his followers to satisfy the perceived universal need for public recognition by converting human equality into identity. The Rousseauean politics of recognition, as Taylor characterizes it, is simultaneously suspicious of all social differentiation and receptive to the homogenizing—indeed even totalitarian—tendencies of a politics of the common good, where the common good reflects the universal identity of all citizens. The demand for recognition may be satisfied on this scheme, but only after it has been socially and politically disciplined so that people pride themselves on being little more than equal citizens and therefore expect to be publicly recognized only as such. Taylor rightly argues that this is too high a price to pay for the politics of recognition.